James Poulos writes about political news, focusing on our choices for liberty and our options for reform. He's a columnist at The Daily Beast, the host of the Free Radicals podcast, and the frontman of a band called Black Hi-Lighter.

It is true, nonetheless, that millions upon millions of us, economically speaking, do belong to government.

Strangely, it’s TIME magazine that has stepped up with a cover story that dares even to consider the problem. “I wake up in subsidized housing,” Michael Grunwald writes. “I throw on a T-shirt made of subsidized cotton, brush my teeth with subsidized water and eat cereal made of subsidized grain.” Soon, “our subsidized nanny arrives to watch our 2-year-old. My wife Cristina then drives to her subsidized job while listening to the subsidized news on public radio.” And on and on it goes.

It’s all enough to lead the average conservative or libertarian to invoke the Road to Serfdom. But as I’ve recently argued, looking to Hayek is mistake for critics of the Age of Obama. Serfs don’t get to do all the fun stuff we can do today — and that we must do, in order to consummate the liberal social contract.

What’s more, however, we’re not on the road to some future undesirable condition. We’re there already. It’s not just that serfdom is the wrong concept to apply. The road is, too. In the main, were ‘there’ already before the economic crisis. The crisis dug us in, and the president’s policies put a lid on it.

There just isn’t a ‘road back’ to wherever it was we were a generation ago. That means there isn’t a ‘roadmap’ or a ‘path’, either. Roadmaps and paths to greater prosperity do not automatically lead to greater freedom in the sense of belonging less to government. (Just ask China, or Tom Friedman.) Paul Ryan and other Republicans know this, but GOP orthodoxy currently boils down to the idea that a people who don’t feel free won’t be prosperous. This conceptual wager doesn’t do much to address the concern that there’s something dangerous about pinning our economic flourishing on the false consciousness of officially recognized ‘owners’. Because the minute the Michael Grunwalds of the world start to really get present to how owned they are, how comprehensively they belong to government, the central contention behind today’s Republican orthodoxy will be put to the acid test.

This is why there’s such a bitter fight between libertarians and establishmentarians in the GOP. It’s not an ideological clash so much as a conceptual one. Some on the right believe the most important thing is for Americans to wake up to how badly they belong to government — the better to alter that reality through revolutionary change. Others believe the most important thing is for Americans to retain the powerful capacity to redream the dream that, in the essentials, they don’t belong to government. According to the first conceptual model, the practical truth sets you free — or at least gives you a fighting chance. According to the second, the moral truth does that. Americans who at all lean to the right are torn between acting from within the practical truth that they belong to the government and acting from within the moral truth that no human being can ever truly belong to a government.

Americans who lean to the left aren’t torn in the same way at all. For them, the liberal social compact resolves that problem — we belong to government because only when we all belong to government will we all be able to avail ourselves of the unique benefits and pleasures of liberal lifestyles. (That’s Hobbes in a nutshell.) Probably very few left-leaners really think that government is the only thing we belong to, but almost all of them probably agree that it is the most important thing we belong to, the thing that’s the condition of possibility for just about everything we enjoy.

Nevertheless… liberals and progressives need to contend with a difficulty Hobbes didn’t face. For Hobbes, the glue that held a commonwealth together was the insuperably awesome authority of the Leviathan — a “mortal-god” that united spiritual and temporal authority, not a bloated, inefficient body of divided powers, lobbyists, representatives, and appointees. Hobbes would warn that people will recoil against belonging to government when the government that owns them lacks the absolute natural and supernatural authority of the Leviathan. Yet today’s left — as was dramatized yesterday by the lame hullabaloo over reinstating reference to God in the Democrats’ party platform — has a grave problem with Hobbes’s one guarantee against the fatal flaw in their political program.

If the impression I’m giving off is that both major political parties face an unworkable conundrum unless they replace their animating political concepts, well, that’s no accident. We entered into today’s predicament years before we, as a people, were capable even of conceptualizing today’s predicament. Just so, Republicans and Democrats think they’re responding to that predicament with new formulations, but are actually still trapped in schemas of thought that presume what today’s situation disproves.

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